


We Find Ourselves Alone

by Aurae



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: 300bpm Flash Exchange August 2019, Flash Fic, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Inspired by Music, Loneliness, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-13 01:46:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20166106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aurae/pseuds/Aurae
Summary: Consumed by grief and guilt after the destruction of his training temple, Jedi Master Luke Skywalker makes the momentous decision to cut himself off from the Force.





	We Find Ourselves Alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Filigranka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filigranka/gifts).

> On est dix à coucher  
Dans le lit de la puissance  
Mais devant ces armées  
Qui s´enterrent en silence  
On se retrouve seul  
— Seul, Jacques Brel

His nephew thinks he’s dead. It’s the only conceivable reason why Luke Skywalker was left alive to watch everything he’d worked so hard for burn down to the ground.

The conflagration is a funeral pyre for his dreams. His tears mix with the soft falls of ash, and he chokes on his grief. This grief would consume him, if he let it.

He does not let it.

The Jedi of the Old Republic preached the virtues of mastering one’s emotions. Master one’s emotions, or they will master you and lead you down a dark path from which you will not return—that’s what they believed.

Luke has come to believe that too. Feel love, but don’t hold onto it. Feel anger, but don’t hold onto it. Feel sorrow, but don’t hold onto it.

Feel pride in one’s worldly accomplishments? He is a hero and a living legend, and it hadn’t mattered, hadn’t saved the Temple or his students. Or Ben Solo. Gone. All gone. His hard work, his life’s work, undone. Beyond his power to prevent.

He won’t hold onto any of it. And if the galaxy is to right itself again someday, its peoples must not hold onto those who have failed them.

Those who have failed them—like Luke Skywalker.

He will leave. They don’t need him. Other heroes and legends will rise to meet the future while he recedes slowly into the past, forgotten.

They will chase him to start with, of course, dog his steps wherever he might flee. Ben will lead that charge. He must leave no trace of his passing.

Luke must cut himself off from the Force.

And so, he does. No more tears. No holding on.

He loses his sense of the galaxy itself first, the rhythmic pulses of life and of death. He no longer feels the planet upon which he stands, neither the air above him, nor the earth beneath his feet.

He loses his sense of the people with whom he has crossed paths, whose lives he has affected, however peripherally. He no longer hears their harmonious hopes or their shouts of joy, their cacophonous disappointments or their grumbles of despair. They linger only as the ghosts of memory.

His mentors in the Ways of the Force aren’t even _ghosts_ to him anymore.

He loses the intimate bonds of family. Families of choice and families of blood alike recede into the distance until their beautiful, beloved faces fade from view. Lost, if not forgotten.

Then silence. Blessed silence.

At last, Luke Skywalker finds himself well and truly alone.

END


End file.
